Defending our environment and health from the U.S. military

May 16, 2003|By Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

With our soldiers' brilliant victory in Iraq, we can take comfort that our military is the best-trained, best-equipped fighting force in the world. But the Pentagon is mounting a sneak attack against America's health and safety on the pretext that federal environmental rules have impeded military readiness. This year's defense authorization bill has proposed to exempt the military from laws that protect America's air, water and endangered species, that regulate toxic waste and the cleanup of Superfund sites.

The federal government is America's biggest polluter and the Department of Defense is the government's worst offender. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, unexploded ordnance waste can be found on 16,000 military ranges across the U.S. and more than half may contain biological or chemical weapons. In total, the Pentagon is responsible for more than 21,000 potentially contaminated sites and, according to the EPA, the military may have poisoned as much as 40 million acres, a little larger than Florida. That result might be considered an act of war if committed by a foreign power.

EPA documents describe a martial assault on America's landscapes and citizens by Pentagon officials who consistently violate federal and military laws with sloppy cleanups and poor or non-existent record keeping. The Pentagon also habitually refuses to obtain permits for prohibited activities. Recalcitrant officers charged with remedying the resulting mess generally decline to investigate off-site contamination and routinely take "ill-advised shortcuts to limit costs," said an EPA report.

The risks to those living on or near military installations can hardly be overstated. Twenty million Americans in 43 states are drinking water poisoned by perchlorate, a cancer-causing chemical used by the military in missile fuel, reports the Robert C. Byrd National Technology Transfer Center at Wheeling Jesuit University.

The experience at Cape Cod, Mass., is typical. Unregulated pollution at Massachusetts Military Reservation has contaminated the only drinking water aquifer for the Cape's 200,000 year-round residents and 520,000 summer visitors. Cancer rates there are dramatically higher than the state average. Malingering Pentagon officials have spent decades dodging the responsibility to clean up their mess. The defense authorization bill will let them off the hook altogether.

The Pentagon has not offered any evidence that federal environmental laws have hindered military preparedness. EPA Administrator Christie Whitman recently told Congress that she didn't "believe that there is a training mission anywhere in the county that is being held up or not taking place because of environmental protection regulation."

Moreover, the statutes now under fire already provide case-by-case exemptions whenever a national security interest is at stake. Even as it seeks to carve out huge new loopholes in our environmental laws, the Pentagon admits that it has never even tried to use the broad national security waivers it already has.

The Pentagon's proposal strips the EPA and states of their authority to protect public health by forcing the military facilities to clean up toxic contamination. Massive cleanup costs would fall on state governments and local communities--most of which are facing severe budget crises.

The Defense Department's arguments for new exemptions in our environmental laws do not pass muster. For example, Pentagon officials maintain that training exercises are banned on more than half of Camp Pendleton in California to protect endangered species habitat. In reality, wildlife protections limit training on less than 4 percent of that military base, according to Natural Resources Defense Council calculations. Pentagon officials also are trying to evade laws that protect marine life, claiming that they hamper the Navy's ability to conduct exercises at sea. While sonar testing and bombing can harm whales, dolphins and other marine mammals, federal wildlife officials have never denied the military a permit to conduct its operations.

President Bush campaigned on a promise to require federal agencies to fully comply with environmental standards and to hold agencies accountable for any violations. In other words, no government agency should be above the law. The president was absolutely right to make that pledge in April 2000, and he should stand by his words as commander in chief.

National defense does not have to come at the expense of the very values that the military is entrusted to defend.